Tuesday 2 November 2010 07.00 EDT
First published on Tuesday 2 November 2010 07.00 EDT

6am ET / 10am GMT Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the 2010 US midterm election day, in which an estimated 90 million Americans will vote on 435 congressional seats, 37 seats in the US Senate, 37 state governorships and thousands of state, city and local elected positions.

The two groups of elections that hold the most interest are in the House of Representatives and Senate, where the Democrats hold a majority in both houses of Congress. While most observers expect heavy Republican gains to wipe out the Democrats' hold on the House, the Senate is a different matter. There the Republicans must win virtually every swing seat to take control – unlikely but not impossible.

Today is the first major test of the influence of the Tea Party movement on US politics, with Tea Party-backed candidates across America expecting to shake up politics both inside and outside of Washington DC.

The first serious results won't be in until 11pm UK time, 7pm on the east coast of the US, so in the meantime follow our coverage here of the day's events as it happens, and the rest of the Guardian's coverage on our US midterm elections page.

For a taste of the atmosphere in some of the most bitterly fought contests, here's a round-up of the 10 worst political ads that have been aired on US television during the campaign season.

7am ET / 11am GMT The polls have been open in Kentucky for almost an hour, and they are about to open in many other eastern states.

Hello, this is Matthew Weaver holding the fort until the expert cavalry arrives later in the form of Simon Jeffery and Richard Adams.

If you haven't being paying that much attention until now, here's a recap:

The Republicans are almost certain to take the House of Representatives. They only need to take 39 seats to win control and they are expected to win way more than that. Some bookies stopped taking bets on the House last week.

So all eyes will be on what happens in the Senate. The Republicans need to take 10 seats off the Democrats to gain control.

These are some of the key Senate races to watch are:

• AlakskaThe Republican vote will be split between the Tea Party candidate Joe Miller, who is expected to shade it, and the sitting senator Lisa Murkowski who he ousted in the primaries. Murkowski is running as a write in candidate - her supporters have to write down her name if they want to elect her.

• ColoradoTea partier Ken Buck has a good chance of beating the Democrat incumbent Michael Bennet, but the race is very close. Nate Silver, blogging in the New York Times, reckons it is the tightest race of the lot.

• IllinoisBarack Obama's old seat could fall to the Republicans in a bitter race between two flawed candidates. The Republican Mark Kirk made exaggerated claims about his military service, and the Democrat candidate Alexi Giannoulias faces questions about donations to mob bosses.

• WisconsinDemocratic heavyweight Russ Feingold is under pressure according to the polls. His wealthy Republican opponent Ron Johnson, who claims his first involvement in politics was attending a Tea Party meeting, is tipped to win. He is a truer representative of the Tea Party movement than some of the more wackier members who have had more prominence in the election, according to the writer Johnathan Raban.

The most crucial of these eight races, are: Colorado, Illinois, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, according to the Guardian's American editor-at-large Michael Tomasky. The Democrats need to hang on to two of these to maintain control of the Senate, he argues.

There is no mention of any of this in Palin's eve of poll message ahead of what she calls "freedom day". Writing on Facebook she urges Americans to remember the day Congress approved Obama's healthcare bill.

So let's fire Pelosi, retire Reid, and send all those who were responsible for that disgraceful bill a message that America is still about "We the People."

7.30am ET / 11.30am GMTWe could start a contest for the worst polling booth Twitpics from candidates tweeting dreadful photos of themselves voting. Linda McMahon, the Republican candidate in Connecticut who used to run World Wrestling Entertainment, has an early entry.

7.55am ET / 11.55am GMTHillary Clinton has compared the US electorate to Goldilocks as she appeared to concede that the Democrats face an election drubbing. To keep out of the race, she is in Kuala Lumpur on a two-week trip to Asia. But in a TV interview she was asked about the challenges facing Obama. Her reply:

A new president gets elected, he usually does an enormous amount his first two years, and then everybody in America says 'well that's not enough' or 'that's too much'.

It's like Goldilocks ... It's too hot, it's too cold, it's not right. So they send a message to the new president by voting out members of Congress of his party.

The short answer is of course they can. In an era of low response rates, imperfect sample coverage and a host of new polling technologies, nothing is certain. At this hour however, the most likely range of that error lies somewhere between a Democratic defeat comparable to 1994 and something much more severe.

Blumenthal points to divergent predictions in some of the contests, but concludes that, if anything, the polls could have underestimated likely Republican gains, because of the "enthusiasm gap" between Republican and Democrat supporters.

Then there's Alaska. The presence of a write-in candidate with a tricky name - Lisa Murkowski - means that lawyers could be spending weeks squabbling over whether voters really intended to vote for her.

The Division of Elections has said that it will not require perfect spelling of Murkowski's name but will instead use a standard of voter intent. This protocol is obviously ambiguous and, since the state does not have many precedents for write-in campaigns of this seriousness and scale, open to challenge. If "Lisa" doesn't count, then would "Lisa M."? Given that there's a Lisa M. Lackey on the write-in list, this iteration might not be sufficient.

Democrats are all curled up in the fetal position, binky in hand, just bracing for the bad news. According to the polls, it's almost certain to be bad news. The only question left is: how bad will it be?

On the Politico story about the Republican plan to stop Sarah Palin, he says:

Should this story be true, memo to the establishment Republicans - if you don't take the advice of the Tea Party, and instead try to eat them up, in two years, you will be able to spell GOP - and America will do it, they'll spell it like this - W-H-I-G. Whig. Where is the Whig Party today? Oh, that's right. They don't exist.

10.35am ET / 2.35pm GMTSimon Jeffery here. Thank you Matthew, and while Glenn Beck delves back into history to scare Republican leaders with the ghost of the Whigs let's look at a more recent moment in US politics: the 2010 midterms campaign.

Richard Adams - who will be in later live blogging the results - has put together a compilation of the 10 worst political ads. They are all there: Georgia Democrat Jim Marshall's clips of 1960s flower power hippies as he boasts about his distance from Nancy Pelosi, his San Francisco-elected party leader; Carly Fiorina's weird weird demon sheep ad; and one from a certain Senate candidate in Delaware who isn't a witch.

Politifact has also put together its highs and lows of the campaign (mostly they're lows). I was particularly taken with its fact-checking of Republican Robert Dold's appealing sea lion ad that said his Democratic opponent, Dan Seals, had run for office "since before there were, like, iPods".

Hold on a minute, says Politifact. Seals's first campaign was for the 2006 midterms (so he maybe started campaigning in 2005) while the first iPods went on sale in November 2001.

11am ET / 3pm GMTCongratulations to Larry Sabato for the neat weather-to-politics segue in the following tweet:

Snowing in Alaska. Senate race has been hellish yet all 3 candidates have a snowball's chance

11.30am ET / 3.30pm GMTIs it me or is that donkey looking more sad than usual today? A new - maybe final - poll from PPP has looked at Obama's approval rating in 18 states and found a positive figure in only one. Furthermore, the Democratic candidate who is the exception to the rule that voters who disapprove of Obama are turned off the party as a whole is Joe Manchin in West Virginia. But then again Manchin is the one whose campaign ad showed him shooting a rifle at a climate change bill.

That state where Obama had a positive approval rating was Connecticut - a relatively small one. Bigger states where he was negative were usually Democratic California and New York, and his home state of Illinois.

Morgan Freeman does not endorse this live blog

11.40am ET / 3.40pm ETMorgan Freeman has received an apology from a Republican House candidate after he falsely claimed the actor had recorded an ad for him.

If that wasn't strange enough already, William "BJ" Lawson in North Carolina's 4th congressional district, explained the incident away with a statement that accused a "political mercenary based out of California" of scamming him:

Once we found out that our contracted advertisement was not narrated by Morgan Freeman, we immediately pulled our ads. Our campaign is comprised almost entirely of volunteers and we were presented with an opportunity to make a great ad – unfortunately these political mercenaries completely misrepresented their offering and contract with us to take our money

Either way, that doesn't look too bright on Lawson's part. The question he should have been asking himself was: why does Hollywood megastar Morgan Freeman want to endorse me, William "BJ" Lawson?

12.20pm ET / 4.20pm GMTAn update to the last post – it appears BJ Lawson, or at least his campaign manager, Martin Avila, did question why Morgan Freeman would want to get involved with a Republican candidate in North Carolina who barely scraped a third of the vote last time around.

Barbara Streisand wouldn't do it this, but Morgan Freeman doesn't have a problem cutting ads against Washington insiders or he wouldn't do it. People shouldn't be so shocked that someone like Mr Freeman would think outside of the left-right red vs. blue dynamic

Harry Reid and Tea Party Express will be holding election night parties in the same hotel? What could possibly go wrong?

1pm ET / 5pm GMTPolls are now open in Hawaii – meaning voting is now taking place across the US. This will continue for the next five hours before polls close in Kentucky and Indiana at 6pm ET / 10pm GMT.

But that doesn't mean Miller won't win, rather he leads the category of unpopular candidates who are probably going to win anyway. Barbara Boxer (D) in California and "whoever emerges as the winner between Harry Reid and Sharron Angle" in Nevada follow him into second and third place.

The flip of this is list of "most popular candidates who are probably going to lose anyway". This is where we find Democrats Scott McAdams in Alaska, Kendrick Meek in Florida, and Elaine Marshall in North Carolina.

2.20pm ET / 6.20pm GMTThe New York Times has asked readers to send in videos explaining why they are voting. There is a 19-year-old in California who wants to legalise marijuana (a choice being put before California voters today).

Good to know that in an election of high spending, high negatives and high disaffection there is still room for people who just want to get high. And that the political process can find new ways to inspire first-time voters once the Obama 2008 magic has worn away.

3.20pm ET / 7.20pm GMTThis is odd, former Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf outside a Pennsylvania polling station. He was apparently doing a radio interview nearby this morning and tagged along with the producer afterwards to take a look at voting (ironic considering his democratic record in Pakistan, but anyway ...)

3.25pm ET / 7.25pm GMTI'm now handing over to Richard Adams.

3.34pm ET / 7.34pm GMT: Thank you Simon, and Matthew, for the transatlantic live blogging, apologies for any jet lag.

Election day in America is always a cheering sight of people proudly wearing "I voted" lapel stickers. A local sandwich chain is giving out free cookies to anyone with a sticker. Of course, here in Washington DC no one can actually vote for congressional candidates (although there are some ersatz "delegates"). And it's a one-party town, Republicans being too smart to disenfranchise themselves by living in the District of Columbia.

Anyway, the phony war continues until the polls close and some actual votes are counted. I'll be here all night. It'll be like live blogging the sinking of the Titanic from the iceberg. Assuming the iceberg had wifi.

3.45pm ET / 7.45pm GMT: The big question of the night is: will Twitter hold up? And the signs aren't looking good so far. But until it collapses into a quirky series of fail whales, why not follow the Guardian's list of Top 50 Twitter accounts for US politics.

Secret shame: the top 50 list now has about 55 accounts. So it's a Top 50-ish list.

3.49pm ET / 7.49pm GMT: So before Twitter's servers melt, ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper is the first to fall victim to Midterm Madness, a dangerous virus incubated for months in the White House press room.

Folks at the campaign headquarters for Prop 19 to legalize marijuana in California seemed a little late turning up to make last minute phone calls this morning when the Guardian popped in. "Perhaps they think we've already won," said one co-ordinator looking at a bunch of empty desks. Judging by the pungent herby smells issuing from a "cigarette" being passed around by three men waiting for a nearby Radioshack to open, a few other citizens in downtown Oakland shared that belief...

4.22pm ET / 8.22pm GMT: Meg Whitman says she has no regrets about her Senate race in California. No regrets? If I spent $140m on running for Senate and all I got was this lousy "Whitman 2010" t-shirt, I'd have some bleedin' regrets. Here's the Los Angeles Times:

"I was new to politics," [Whitman] said in an appearance on the Good Day, LA morning show on KTTV. "What my investment in this campaign has done is give California voters a choice. They do know what I stand for. This is a very stark choice between a career politician and a career problem-solver."

Yes, well, but $140m? Even if you win, is it worth it?

Time to wrap things up here and get ready for the votes to be counted.